Kafoodle, the company behind the UK’s simple yet smart hospitality menu management software, is set to launch a ground-breaking new system designed for the healthcare sector, with the help of a substantial government grant.
The government’s innovation agency, Innovate UK has awarded the team behind Kafoodle over £200,000. The money will be spent developing a prototype of Kafoodle Kare - a cloud based personal nutritional care plan designed for use in hospitals, care homes and schools to map out food allergens, nutritional and medical needs helping to create effective patient meal plans in line with government legislation.
Tarryn Gorre, co-founder of Kafoodle who is heading up the project says: “The idea for Kafoodle Kare came from witnessing first-hand how poorly hospitals were catering to patients with specific dietary needs, whether it be diabetes, a food allergy or a personal preference. Some patients, especially children, spend substantial amounts of time in hospital and there seemed an obvious opportunity to make their experience with food whilst in care a better one. This with growing government legislation around food gave us the idea of Kafoodle Kare.
“Patient care plans are supposed to monitor nutrition and dietary intakes; however even electronic care plans rely on visual cross checking to spot allergic and medical reactions. Food intolerances are rarely catered for, meals lack nutrition and taste, and there is no quality standard benchmarked across healthcare providers.
“Having already responded effectively to the allergens legislation in hospitality in 2014 with the creation of Kafoodle, we knew we were in a good position to design something, that would address all these issues, for the healthcare market.
“Kafoodle Kare will be a practical solution for the hundreds of hospitals and residential homes that struggle to provide the 2.8 million meals a day needed for patients with up to as many as 50 different dietary requirements. Currently 30 million meals are wasted each year at a cost of £230 million at a time when the NHS needs to make £22 billion savings.”
The Kafoodle Kare system will map permitted ingredients in meal plans to medical conditions and all possible dietary needs, including Halal patients, nut allergies, Warfarin users, high protein and diabetic diets, hence providing a food resource management system that can be stand-alone, integrated into existing patient/resident management systems or via barcodes on wrist bracelets. Kitchen staff could plan and resource cost effective, nutritional, appropriate wholesome foods that meet patients’ dietary and medicals. Kafoodle Kare would enable businesses to reduce costs and wastage, raise food standards and meet mandatory requirements, as well as giving patients confidence in their levels of care.
Kafoodle Kare also has the backing of Care England which has agreed to help secure a care home for the pilot study, as well as Brakes, one of the UK’s largest providers of patient dining and dietetics. It is also currently in discussion with various hospitals and already have 90 schools signed up to trial the prototype.
The development of the prototype and trials is set to take two years, launching in January 2018.
